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Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Visibility of Transgender: A History of "Freaks & Queers"

"They were made freaks, socially constructed for the purpose of entertainment and profit"Freaks and QueersEli Clare

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A Genealogy of Freaks

As a transgender man with cerebral palsy, Clare recognizes from personal experience how a variety of people, especially those he names in his chapter "Freaks and Queers" are separated from society by longstanding habits of gawking. As a lived situation, being treated as a "freak" makes Clare feel alone and unique. This experience of being isolated by medical and social categorizes is compounded by the treatment of the modern moment as one of unprecedented scientific and cultural knowledge. Transgender, transgender, intersex, cerebral palsy, and disability are all words with very particular modern meanings. As such the bodies and lives they are supposed to describe are defined within specific modern contexts, effectively cutting them off from the impulse to draw on historical struggles, cultural genealogies, and collective pride. "I want to unravel freak, to pull on the thread called history," writes Clare of the desire to cross the geographic and temporal divisions that keep marginalized people from identifying with one another (71). Indeed, by remapping history, Clare discovers how transgender, intersex, and disabled people have long been isolated from collective experiences of time and space through the work of various kinds of Freak Shows. Clare writes, "bearded women, fat women... intersexed people... became wondrous and horrifying exhibits... nature did not make them into freaks, the freakshow did." (71-72). In other words, transgender and intersex people did not suddenly appear in the nineteenth and twentieth century as isolated objects of study and entertainment but are in part produced in the mechanisms of enfreakening that has roots in the medieval period.

"Intersexed people, transsexuals, and people who don't conform to gender norms - such as bearded women who grow their beards - have their own history at the freakshow," claims Clare (96). For Clare, "history at the freakshow," is not simply a history of the freakshow. Rather, diverse peoples who have existed across time have crossed through periods and places where they have been transformed into localized tourist attractions. These places - or shows - take on different forms and use different language but the function of the freakening is a mechanism that extends across differences in time and embodiment. "The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization," writes Clare. "The court jester, the pet dwarf, the exhibition of Renaissance England, the myths of giants, minotaurs, and monsters all point to this long history" (71). Clare reaches wide and far to gather a wide collection of peoples into his history yet roots this collectivity as central in the anachronistic project of the freakshow. "The freakshow," writes Clare, "construct[ed] an exaggerated divide between 'normal' and Other, sustained in turn by rubes willing to pay good money to stare." (72). In particular, Clare's cultural history hovers around the pre-modern period where the stories of Amazons and Hermaphrodites were imagined alongside pet dwarves and monsters. In the medieval period, these peoples who today are isolated in medical studies and doctor's offices can be found together in islands on the margins of the world or showed before princes.

Clare acknowledges that there is a linguistic and archival problem in mapping a history of freakdom but hopes to find stories that allow for imaginative alternatives in pre-modern pre-medicalized bodies of freaks. "Queer identity has been pathologized and medicalized," writes Clare. "Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder. Today, transsexuality and transgenderism, under the names of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder, are considered psychiatric conditions. Queerness is all too frequently intertwined with shame, silence, and isolation"(96). For critics of medieval transgender or intersex studies, these modern medical terms can be through up as roadblocks. The claim can be made that premodern peoples did not understand themselves with the same concepts by which current peoples identify. Yet Clare argues that this fixation on terminology is a part of the practice of objectifying shared subjective experiences that are often much messier. "In the centuries before medicalization...," writes Clare, "the Christian western world had encoded disability with many different meanings" (82). A key part of this work then is translation and the ability of metaphor and analogy to help identification across differences. This points towards imagined cultural histories over the strict boundaries of medical categorization. "I want to follow the messier course, to examine the ways in which the ugly words we sometimes use to name our pride to into tap into a complex knot of personal and collective histories" (93). If enfreakening is the process of isolating and shaming individual persons, then this alternative mapping of the past emphasizes the slippages in category and experience in order to call for collective power and pride through shared history.

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The Place of Freaks

There becomes a circuitous relationship between freaks and their environment, as indeed as the physical and social machinery of various types of freakshows work to contain and explain bodies that diverge from the norm according to their constructed surroundings. When these freakshows were the most successful at its their work, the peoples would appear as natural monsters - literally from the Latin those who "show" or prove a point. This however, argues Clare, is an effect and not a cause of their circumstances. "Whatever these paying customers - rubes in circus lingo - believed, they were not staring at freaks of nature," writes Clare. "Rather, the freak show tells the story of an elaborate and calculated social construction" (71). These circumstances were the beliefs that defined the meaning of the lives contained in the shows but which in turn constructed the environments which were regarded as the natural place of such monsters. Enfreaking was then a process rather than a natural state. "At the center of this construction is the showman, who, using costuming, staging, elaborate fictional histories, marketing, and choreography, turning people from four groups [disabled people, both native and foreign non-disabled people of color, and non-disabled people with visible differences] into freaks," writes Clare (71). These showman were those who had the power of narrative. Mandeville fits this role in his travels for the Hermaphrodites and Amazons which he places and describes. Such showmen control the machinery but treat their role as merely explanatory, covering up the role their knowledge construction had in making the circumstances they described and represented.

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they are often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival," writes Clare (78). The power to write histories are a privilege of circumstances where a person is command of their time, surroundings, and language to be allowed to tell stories. "Some of the 'freaks' didn't read or write, due to their particular disabilities or to the material/social circumstances of their lives. Or, as in the case of many of the people brought here from other countries, they didn't speak English and/or didn't come from cultures that passed stories through the written word" (78). Those who could write were the people who were free from the confines of their place in society. This meant that those who lived on the margins or were enlisted into freakshows often did not have control of their environment enough to turn it into narrative. "Clearly, working as a freak meant working a lousy job, many times the only job available," writes Clare. "Sometimes the job was lousier than others" (77). Indeed, these jobs and social positions could be described various as "lousy" because of an environmental intimacy and social association with louses and other parasites. The places of the freaks on the margins, were made out as less hygienic, less controlled by the healthy and wholesomeness of central peoples and places. Here the undesirable lived alongside and on one another. Metaphorically, the peoples on the margins became imagined as infestations, clinging and hiding along the fringes of properly governed places and bodies. Yet as Clare notes, these were often the only places and ways of living left for these peoples to survive and from these places magrinalized people are left to draw the metaphors and images with which they will be described to the world of gawkers.

As time went on, the brushing away of premodern travel texts and even the modern side-shows signals to many the improvement of the lives of those marked as monsters and freaks yet as Clare demonstrates, changes in form do not always mean a change in the machinery or its effects. Although the Isle of Hermaphrodites is nowhere on the modern map, this does not mean that freakshows ended but rather shifted to less public medical offices and textbooks. "The end of the freak show didn't mean the end of our display or the end of voyeurism," writes Clare. "We simply traded one kind of freakdom for another" (Clare 87). As a process, the freakshow can change while continuing to fulfill its purpose. In the premodern islands, as in today's gawkers of transgender and intersex people, "they came to be educated and entertained, titillated and repulsed. They came to have their ideas of normal and abnormal, superior and inferior, their sense of self, confirmed and strengthened" (71).Throughout his expansive history, Clare continually moves into language of the collective and co-identified, saying "we" and "us" when referring to the monsters, freaks, and other marginalized. On the other hand, Clare refers to gawkers as "they" who enfreaken or "them." The differentiation happens at the place of the freakshow where differences were and are asserted. "Take for instance public stripping, the medical practice of stripping disabled children to their underwear and examining them in front of large groups of doctors, medical students, physical therapists, and rehabilitation specialists. They have the child walk back and forth. They squeeze their muscles. They watch his gait, muscle tension, footfall, back curvature. They take notes and talk among themselves about what surgeries and therapies they might recommend" (88). While the dirty freakshow has been replaced by sterile enviornments, the isolation and objectification of the bodies continue. In the end, these forms of categorical knowledge, of putting peoples in their places, is an act of power as well of delight.

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The Flaunters and the Gawkers

Given the place of transgender, intersex, and disability in the history of freak shows, Clare argues that it is necessary to be able to transform these loca of shame into appropriated sites of pride. Indeed, these counter-movement, argues Clare, began from the earliest moment that the privileged traveled far and went through expense in order to be able to see the marginalized. "I relish the knowledge that there have been people who have taken advantage of white people's and nondisabled people's urge to gawk," writes Clare (95). While staring and gawking are both acts of power, asserting the freak as set apart by their difference from society's rules of polite interaction, those who were stared at were imbued with a kind of power to enchant. Even as they were pushed to the margins, these peoples on the margins drew people to them and became loca sancta in their own right. The critical contingency is that this power may or may not be a force the marginalized could control. Clare writes, "the people who worked as freaks - especially those who had some control over their own display - grasped an exploitative situation in an exploitative world and, as often as possible, turned it toward their benefit" (79). Freakshows made money for showmen and this was a trade that many transgender and intersex people learned. By turning their lives into performances, people can exploit the gawking they receive for their own benefit. By demonstrating that such divides and places are artificially defined, the possibilities for alternatives arise. "Even the binary of female-bodied and male-bodied appears more and more to be a social construction," Clare observes, "as intersexed people... begin to speak publicly about their lives and the medical intrusion they've faced" (127-128). By claiming history and identifying with one another's struggles, the tools and constructs that define gender in the body and the environment are reveal as socially made, thus suggesting that they might be remade or otherwise used.Clare asks if history can reclaim and find pride in the freaks struggle? "They shape pride out of a centuries-old legacy of performing on the street corner, at the open air fair, in the palace and at the carnival as freak, monster, pet dwarf, court jester, clown," writes Clare. "The history that for so long has placed us on stage, in front of audiences, sometimes in subversion and resistance, other times in loathing and shame, ask not only for pride, but also for our witness as our many different personal histories come tangling into our collective one" (100). In the end, the crux is about the question of who can benefit and who can identify from freakshows. Will they always be managed by outside authorities or can the marginalized claim a collective history? The critical shift seems to be the move from a medical model back to a cultural model of place as it provides more slippages, messy middles, and possibilities for simultaneous effect. "We are declaring, that doctors and their pathology, rubes and their money, anthropologists and their theories, gawkers and their so called innocuous intentions, bullies and their violence, showmen and their hype, Jerry Lewis and his telethon, government bureaucrats and their rules will no longer define us," concludes Clare (90). Indeed, Clare calls for a new turn in scholarship that seeks to give the power of definition and location to the peoples defined and located rather than controlling them by such means. History and mapmaking need not be dispelled as a way to understand lived experiences of time and space but the tools and constructs must be better shared. "We need to know our history, come to understand which pieces of that history we want to make our own, and develop a self-image of pride," writes Clare (90). The freakshow and isle of monsters might turn from a place of shame into a place of pride if only it turns from the isolated topic (and topos) of specialists and authorities into a world of collective identification. Only then can history become a form of liberating the past and not a further circumscribing of it.

The benefit of sharing the power of a history will embolden the oppressed today rather than define their limits. "Whatever we name ourselves, however we end up shattering our self-hatred, shame silence, and isolation," writes Clare, "the goal is the same: to end our daily material oppression." (101). Continuing to use the collective tense, "we," Clare insists on a history and mapmapping that looks at making connections to marginalized places rather than alienated "them" from one another and the self. Pride in this form is a collective experience that invites identification and a sharing of stories, bodies, and other social resources. Only with this group power can change happen. "Pride is not an inessential thing. Without pride, disabled people are much more likely to accept unquestioningly the daily material conditions of ableism: unemployment, poverty, segregated and substandard education, years spent locked up in nursing homes, violence perpetuated by caregivers, lack of access," writes Clare (91). Mapping out these places of isolation and connecting them with places of monstrocity and freakdom in the past combined critical powers. Where scholars see one as oppressive so too might they be drawn to see the injustice in the other. By so being connected, these lives speak to the value and meaning of one another. A sense of pride develops and pride means a share in power. Power then might mean material change. "Without pride," concludes Clare, "individual and collective resistance to oppression becomes nearly impossible." (91). Pride is the impulse and the power to look beyond the confines of time and place to see more connected and collective possibilities of shared histories and space.

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More on Eli Clare

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Clare points to Rosemarie Garland Thomson's theorizing and historicizing scholarship as critical to comprehending the genealogies that constructed Amazons, Hermaphrodites, Trans and Intersex people as freaks. "Perhaps the freak show's most remarkable effect was to eradicate distinctions among a wide variety of bodies," writes Garland Thomson. "[A]ll the bodily characteristics that seemed different or threatening to the dominant order merged into a kind of motley chorus line of physical difference on the freakshow stage" (Garland Thomson 62-63).